Haaretz has an article about a large collection of amulets that are being offered for sale. There was one paragraph in the article that is on the borderline between misleading and just wrong. The medieval scholar Maimonides, as well as rabbis in the talmudic era, prohibited Jews from using amulets, especially those made from parts [...]
The Rabbi’s Daughter, בת הרב, is a documentary about three daughters of three different national-religious rabbis in Israel who have chosen to live a life that is different from the house in which they were raised. There is no connection between this film and the book, The Rabbi’s Daughter. HT: FB
From the Courthouse News: A man claims in court that a New Jersey rabbi had him assaulted, handcuffed and blindfolded and threatened to have him “eaten alive by rats,” then forced him to submit to a quickie rabbinical divorce. HT: Rabbi Neal L.
Has Open Orthodoxy on its way to became much more open? From a post by Rabbi Zev Farber at Morethodoxy, “Women’s Participation in Ritual: Time for a Paradigm Shift”: This is where I believe the paradigm shift must occur. To break out of this vicious cycle, we need to shift the paradigm 180 degrees. Instead [...]
From Haaretz: Tempers are still boiling over a conference about Israel studies that took place this summer, in which speakers were initially asked to lecture in English. Though the organizers of the annual conference of the international Association for Israel Studies eventually allowed renowned Israeli writer Sami Michael to deliver a speech about racism in [...]
The Leo Baeck Institute has announced the digitization of much of their holdings, DigiBaeck.
The most recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has been released. (here) Most reports have been emphasizing the rise of the “nones.” The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of [...]
From a review at H-Judaic of Michael Cohen’s The Birth of Conservative Judaism: Solomon Schechter’s Disciples and the Creation of an American Religious Movement. Cohen’s initial task is to overturn several persistent theories regarding Conservative Judaism’s origins. Most accounts of the movement locate its beginnings in the nineteenth century, either with Zecharias Frankel’s “positive-historical school” [...]
Another new Daf Yomi initiative is Daily Daf Differently. We hope you will join us as we go through the process of learning the daily Talmud page led by a group of master Rabbis and teachers who will take a look at the “Daf Yomi” through a liberal lens. This initiative is hosted by Jcast [...]
Below are videos of the evening devoted to Yaakov Sussman’s recent book on the manuscripts of the Talmud that took place in July at Yad Ben Zvi. (H)
You are currently browsing the Menachem Mendel blog archives for October, 2012.
